To say 50/50 shared custody is selfish and horrible for children

[5050hell]

I spent my childhood doing 2/2/3. I have begged my partner should we end up divorcing that we never do this to our children. We are actually very happy together, this is only a worry of mine due to how much I hated it as a child.

Never spending more than 5 consecutive nights anywhere. Constantly packing a bag and having to drag it to school (as that was when switches happened, leave one house and go back to another). As I got older never having the clothes I wanted, or even the book I was planning on reading next. Trying to make plans with friends, then turning up at the other parents house only to be told that my Saturday was spoken for. Parents being difficult about sleepovers at friends as would be missing 'their' night. No flexibility, parents acting hurt if I didn't want to stick to the schedule. Not to mention my dad did not pay maintenance due to this arrangement, and certain things were supposed to be done turn by turn (ie. Dinner money, bus pass school trips) often spent so long arguing I never got them!

It's mainly my father I resent, as this set up was arranged for him to avoid maintenance payments. I do resent my mother for not trying harder to fight it. We've spoken about it since, she says she thought it was the right thing.

I am extremely adverse to staying anywhere other than my own home as an adult, and feel like I always need a routine and schedule and worry about planning etc.

I haven't thought about this for many years until the stage of life now becoming a parent myself.

Perhaps I was an overly sensitive kid? Maybe it's easier now with phones etc.

I can't help but think that for a child it's far better to have a main home, and visits to the other parent. AIBU?

Have you listened to the many posters whose parents got divorced and who now as adults feel the same way as the OP?

You are talking in the child's perspective.
And in that perspective the only solution is for a child to decide independently where they want to be.
The only person I know who maintains that divorce is not a traumatic thing for children is a friend who was allowed to spend any day or night at his father's house, his mother's house or at his gran's.
No questions asked, he just had to keep everybody informed.
This requires a very considerable commitment and maturity on the parents side, which is rare I suppose.

I think the two lots of everything helps - so you are never short of school uniform or books or things at each house. Also parents dropping any belongings that need to go in between rather than insisting the kid lumbers it all to school (along with their regular stuff and PE kit!).
also other people have said regular clubs or sleepovers get stopped so that parents can fully have ‘their time’ with the child. I think normal should continue as much as possible. A child is not a toy - if they have plans that evening eh scouts and dad misses out seeing the child on ‘their turn’ then so be it. The parent doesn’t see the child that evening and they suck it up.

Actually, psychology research is pretty clear this isn’t true.

Children do best when they live at home with both parents. But post-separation, children do better in joint custody arrangements (including 50/50) than they do when they primarily live with one parent.

A very quick search of Google scholar could have told you this.

A few examples:

https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/8/769

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10502556.2018.1454204

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10502556.2014.965578

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313020/

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10502556.2016.1185203

https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/25543/1/child-outcomes-after-parental-separation.pdf

If 50/50 is disruptive, so too is 30/70 or 20/80. Kids are still having to leave and stay elsewhere. What are the people saying it’s so awful actually proposing? What would be acceptable to you? A return to the 1980s where dad sees the kids on Sunday in McDonald’s for a few hours? It seems people want to go backwards in terms of social progress. And I’m sure nesting is “impressive” yes. Mainly because it signals a level of wealth where the parents don’t have to sell the family home to rehouse themselves. 95% of people wouldn’t be able to do that even if they wanted to.

I suspect the OP would have been unhappy with any arrangement to be honest because the problem was her dad, not the level of time. Had he been a brilliant dad she would have enjoyed spending half her time with him.

Actually I found less issues when DS was a teenager. He merely glitted between the 2 houses at will

I separated from my dc’s dad about 15 years ago and it’s always been a flexible and informal arrangement, but since she started school it’s been 5:2 most weeks. Sometimes she stays extra nights with one or other of us. But we did that because back then, the chat I picked up about it was that children needed a main home, where they spent most time, so that they could feel more secure. I’d also always been the primary parent. Our set up meant that we each had a night and a day at the weekend, and he also had a school pick up and a drop off. DC is mid teens now and it still works quite well. School is good at allowing her to leave books and equipment in her tutor base so she doesn’t have to carry 2 days’ worth of kit to and fro, and that does help.

Hard to say because there are many issues with weekend parents as well. The main one being the fact one parent has to pick up all of the slack in terms of school runs, homework, afterschool clubs, most bedtimes/meals etc then the other parent gets to be the fun one for two days which isn’t fair.

I can see why 50/50 would be disorientating for a child too but I guess it must work for some.

But that's from your experience, with your parents and life. Just because it didn't work for you doesn't mean it can't work for everyone. My parents were together until she died, but if I would have had to pick a parent to live with it won't have been my father. Not that I didn't love my mother but I was always closer to my dad and our personalities are more alike. I know Mumsnet is pretty out there with it's biases but the mother is not always the best option and not all Dad's are trying to avoid paying maintenance.

I think it sounds like a challenging upbringing that has cast a shadow for your OP. I don't think its unreasonable to try and work these ideas out for your own family but I would also say, its sometimes difficult to avoid the blueprint established by our parents, in terms of how things end up. A good friend of mine was raised by her single mother and when marital issues arose in her own life, she ended up doing the same, cutting the father out almost completely. I do wonder if some family therapy and time to work on things might have kept that family in tact.

What I'm saying is you may well subconsciously be thinking divorce is a foregone conclusion. I would work damn hard against that.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a parallel universe compared to current parents on "children of divorce" threads. My parents' divorce was in no way traumatic for me, and I'm glad it happened. Living at my mum's and staying at my dad's EOW was fine, and I wouldn't have wanted to split my time any more than that. For almost everyone I know who has divorced or has divorced parents, it's because the mum decided to leave the dad for good reasons, often being that he wasn't good at shouldering his responsibility as a parent and she was - so why should a dad like that expect a 50/50 strong relationship with the child? Should have been better when they had the chance, then they might not have to make these custody arrangements.

Also, saying that having 2 sets of stuff mitigates not having a home is so short-sighted. It might work for really small children, but your "things" are not just the basic essentials plus some way to play videogames. When you were an older child/teen, didn't you regularly read/use books or other possessions that you knew you had somewhere, that you wouldn't have packed in an overnight bag or had a duplicate of? If you were travelling now, as an adult, would you say the suitcase of essentials and clothes for the duration was enough to make your hotel room "home"?

And to this post:

Total crap. Even if you do EOW you’d still be moving between two homes. You’d just not really be spending much meaningful time with the other parent and the relationship would suffer. 50/50 doesn’t stop anyone having a safe base at all.

What part of it was crap? It's safe BASE, not bases. I don't think it's possible to have a true feeling that somewhere is HOME when moving every couple of days, and I think that's more damaging than having a less close relationship with one parent, especially if it's one who was left for not being a great parent in the first place.

I think you can have a sense of home in two places. I don’t think home absolutely must be one place. You can have two homes and that’s what many kids who do 50/50 have and it’s what they feel they have. I know some families who do two weeks on and two weeks off with older kids and it works really well. They are very settled and happy and they can pop back to get things if they have forgotten them. Nowadays so much is online and you can login wherever you are and get your photos, messages etc.

Moving every two days is of course disruptive and I think that’s quite a bad arrangement. But longer stretches is beneficial for many kids and they feel that they have a home in each place. Whereas for EOW they’d feel like visitors in the other place and it would also be frequent enough to feel really quite disruptive.

I did choose to live with my dad when my parents divorced. In the late 70s it was even more unusual

50/50 works well if you coparent well and do all the heavy lifting in terms of creating equity across two houses. Meaning they don’t have to pack bags, same transport to school etc.

What about the fathers that do know their DC's teachers names etc? Should they just resign themselves to staying in a bad relationship for fear that they'll be relegated to EOW dad if they split, or what?

I didn't know half my kids teachers names either Except the maths teacher of DD1 that's she regularly moaned about. Didn't know that was a pre requisite of being a parent

Precisely.

Why should capable and committed fathers go from seeing their own children every day, to seeing them two days a week at the whim of their mother.

I don’t know many women who would accept the same for themselves, or believe it would be in the best interest of their children to see them so sporadically.

Yes there’s so much anti-dad bias on here peddling the ridiculous myth that all mums are brilliant and all dads are shit and would only want 50/50 to avoid maintenance.

My DP has 50/50. He is the primary parent without a doubt. He does haircuts, dentists, doctors, organises after school activities, all liaison with the school, applying for secondary school, everything. Their mum does absolutely zero of this stuff despite having them half the time. Doesn’t do homework either. She does write a blog about how great a mum she is and how he’s a shit dad though so I don’t tend to take all claims about shit dads at face value.

My DP initially had a midweek night, all school/nursery runs and a Sunday afternoon, because his at the time 2 year old “needed his mother.”

That became 50/50 when my stepson was 3, then 60/40, 70/30 by the time he was 5. Eventually his mum voluntarily gave him up when he was 8 and walked away altogether. No access, her choice.

Turns out he didn’t “need his mother” after all. He does, to be clear, but still.

YABU

What -was- unfair, was the way -you- were brought up. It sounds like you're fairly traumatised by your upbringing and projecting it onto the 50/50 set-up in a sweeping, blanket statement. Your parents should have known and done better. You're harboring rightful and justified anger toward your Father, but you cannot allow him to continue being a toxic in your mind. I feel you would benefit from some counselling, because it sounds like you are coping by using some unhealthy habits.

Refer yourself to a GP, because you need to alleviate some of this trauma.

I havent yet heard from a child who did 50/50 and loved it.

It was the selfish decision to force 50/50 and prevent me from having the basic human desire for a place to - fully, wholly - call home, that left me unsettled.

I think that's what I've come to feel. I have read and taken in every single post.

He had been a poor father when he was married so I do have a comparison. His behaviour amplified my childhood issues BUT my life was better when he was still a poor father and I didnt have to bounce between homes every couple of days.

Had he been a good father, the answer would still not have been 50/50. It would have been him making sacrifices for my stability, and allowing me to keep grounded in one home.

Thank you all for your input. I don't regret posting and appreciate all your responses.

I still think it’s the 2/2/3 that was the problem, NOT the 50/50.

Yanbu for feeling the pain of the crap your parents made you deal with. However yabu to therefore generalise that your experiences must be true for every child who grows up with 50:50 care. There are some families who make it work. If both parents are mature, competent, properly take their fair share of the parenting workload, reject petty vindictive behaviours that punish their ex but rather centre the wellbeing of the child(ren), don't penny-pinch, and live close enough to each other thar it's easy to swing by and grab a forgotten book or jacket or whatever, then all the negatives you experienced melt away. Yabu too to fret about this wrt your own kids when there's currently no danger of you splitting with their dad!

certain things were supposed to be done turn by turn (ie. Dinner money, bus pass school trips) often spent so long arguing I never got them!

My dad didn't do 50/50 care when he was married. He didn't after either, we mostly had his mother round. We should have been with our own.

I understand my dad threatened her to take full custody (I never knew this at the time). And generally to make her life difficult.

I resent my father as I don't feel wanted to raise me. I was initially extremely confused when I found out I would be spending half my time with him.

He wanted to avoid paying maintenance, which would have been a lot due to his high salary. Instead, he was able to pay nothing, and when we were younger use his mother and OW (and sometimes female colleagues) to babysit us.

I have a good relationship with my mother and VLC with my father, NC with his wife.

We were physically in his house 50% of the time - mostly in the company of any female he could find to babysit when I was younger, then alone when older until at least 19.30.

None of this sounds like a true 50/50 custody arrangement @5050hell

Technically, you were in your Dad’s house for 50% of the time - but he didn’t do 50% of the care or parenting. What makes a house a home to children? It’s not just the physical environment, but the stability and love provided by the parents. Your Dad wasn’t interested in providing that. So it makes complete sense that you never felt you had a stable home base.

You were in a high conflict situation where you felt used as a bargaining chip, and not properly cared for by someone who insisted on 50% custody.

That’s a really shitty situation to put a child in and I’m not surprised you’re LC with him now. And I’m sorry this happened to you.

But it’s really not fair to compare this situation to a true 50/50 arrangement - where both parents play an active role, prioritise time with their children, and work hard to provide two stable home environments that meet the needs of their children.

You’re comparing apples to oranges.

Had he been a good father, the answer would still not have been 50/50. It would have been him making sacrifices for my stability, and allowing me to keep grounded in one home.

If he had been a good father, why would it necessarily have been on him to make sacrifices for your stability and not your mother? Do you consider mothers the default parent?